Bubble and plugin ecosystem tips on improvements

Tips
1

Bubble as platform
Bubble is the only platform currently that can build complex apps without code, maybe there are few competition but they are still behind when it comes to what you can achieve fairly from no-code perspective.

Now bubble has slow adoption despite it’s so good features mainly because it caters to western and european markets and we can all agree that average people from eastern part of the world wouldn’t be able to afford such high monthly cost(in terms of USD to their local currencies) unless they earn too much from salary or revenue from their business.

Bubble is a platform that not only attracts non-coders but also coders cause it’s where you don’t have to struggle with all those bugs and errors and waste too much of your time building simple apps that they use internally at the company or as a freelancer when the app don’t even have that many users initially this is the best approach from an business point of view as the cost of developing an app is low and focused on core features hence they can iterate faster and deploy updates and features faster based on user feedbacks.

I have seen one of bubble competitor have adopted parity pricing (to price based on countries purchase power parity), I think it’s a best model of pricing that gives opportunity to give platform to all the users especially in eastern countries where number of coders is equivalent to western world and also have huge adoption at the same time due to huge population and there by leading to more word of mouth, more plugins leading to better competition among devs to price based on demand and build features users want and free marketing from bloggers, youtubers doing YouTube tutorials, tips and stuff.

Bubble plugin ecosystem
Now coming to plugin ecosystem,
The current system is messed up simply because some (not all) of the paid plugins I believe are just a basic stuff that can be done within bubble or by simple google search (this again attributes to slow adoption hence less resources online), people shouldn’t be ripped off just because they are new or not from coding background. There should be basic requirements set by bubble on what is considered as plugin and whether it actually provides some value. There are many marketplaces that have good marketplace system in place like on Shopify apps, Trello power-ups, atlassan marketplace etc…(not sure how all these works but from simple searching they seem good, I have used shopify so I can vouch that it’s good marketplace system in place).

Bubble currently lets us(plugin developers) use only stripe while it’s okay there should be availability of other payment gateways or Bubble can themself handle the payment part as they already take commission from bubble devs and this allows developers to focus more on building features rather than payment, taxes and other parts of it.

Now for the free plugins, some devs just do it for fun or did it for their use case and open sourced it. Now the issue comes when it’s there are many plugins that are outdated in the marketplace so it’s better to opensource the plugins truly like on GitHub repositories, letting the users of plugin or anyone to actually contribute to the plugin not just allowing read only like its current state.

last but not least introduce freemium, there are many devs who are ready to offer freemium to get both the word of mouth and paying customers this model can bring a huge improvement in the plugin ecosystem.

Hope these suggestions/improvements would be considered by Bubble team.

Do you think bubble should consider with these suggestions?
    • Yes
    • No
    • I agree on some but not on all
0 voters
2

Need to research more if you believe that.

Many of the “simple plugins that can be done with bubble” preform way better with a plugin than it would pure bubble or cater to people who don’t know even basic JS.

Stripe suggestion and more payment gateways…learn to code or use one of the other provided plugins for payment, there are plenty…

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3

There’s room for improvment for sure, but even if some plugin are basic stuff like you said, they can help some other users and also save time.

I also disagree to let other user modify a free plugin code. This is not like a github library. Theses plugins are used in production! If you need or want to improve a plugin, you can fork it and modify it.

However, Bubble need to give some love and attention to marketplace, remove some plugins that doesn’t work or are mostly duplicate.

I think one of the main difference between other “plugin marketplace” VS Bubble is that Bubble marketplace are mostly community plugins while other are plugins made by the app (shopify,trello…) or the third-party provider (like jira in trello) itself (like Bubble have too). But I doesn’t found them better “plugins” marketplace often…

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4

I think there should be an option for open source plug-ins. Forking is great but I haven’t seen many forks. It would be great if a collection of developers could work on the same plugin and release versions, like for Linux. The reason is that forking things means there’s a million versions of the same thing. It’s better to have many people improve one thing, a fork isn’t always necessary!

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5

the plugin dev can still review the code and merge it like in the github and release it in the next version update, this saves a lot of time for plugin author in updating the plugin and sometimes other dev might have better idea or way to achieve same things and improving the plugin

6

stripe suggestion was actually for plugin devs, not as a user. There are many countries where stripe doesn’t support or is not allowed for regulatory reason or whatever.

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